Jason got a sword.

So Jason got a sword.  Paid a buck for it on EBay, and it still cost him twenty five bucks shipping and duty.  It had a broken tang and some rust.  Just the blade...no handle or scabbard.  It was folded steel though, and the decoration was hand chiseled. 

Gold...

Before and after gold plating.
The second from the left is awaiting a new buffing and cleaning, seems there are spots on it, in back where you can't see it. But the customer is very picky. (Imagine the meanest Sergeant Major you ever heard about. Now imagine HIS boss. Yup, thats who I am fixing up these swords for! ) When I finish prepping it, it will look like the other three.
A lot of difficulty getting this gold to stick....it took a bath in muriatic acid to convince the gold to find a home. Toxic darned stuff that! I am coughing from the vapors from the neutralizing solution. And the gold solution. And the cleaning solution. And the buffing and polishing dust. All the hard polished hammer faces in my shop have turned green. I think that happens with chlorine.

I was asked by email why the Canadian Military has these old Air Force swords anyway. I mean, they must date back to the middle of the last century! Well, they use them to hold the flags down on the casket of fallen flying officers. They decided that using "army" swords was not really the right thing to do. So even though I am making, what, fifty cents an hour repairing these old swords, I think it is a privilege to do these swords up to where they should be.

I'll put a nice little photo essay up here in the next couple of pages, say, when I get some of these swords all proper and ready to go. There were many setbacks during this job.

click on the images to enlarge.
ip-location map zoom" border="1">

Swords

These swords are in really bad shape. Above is the result of about a half hour on the buffer
And below is what they look like after most of a day being buffed down.

They have lots of scratches. In the below picture, you can see how bad they really are. They have not been kept in any sort of cloth bag or other protection, and in fact, the leather scabbards are even broken.
Below is a closeup showing the scratches which need to be buffed out. All without damaging the surface features!

Above you can see how long it has been since they have had any maintenance...the brass is showing crystals.
And above, the handle has been dropped so that the backstrap has been sprung outward.



The damage is fairly extensive. Below, making them look worse than they are, is the results of attempting to polish with brasso. Compare this picture to the one at the top of this post....same sword!

The Wurm is a Forgery

click on these images to enlarge. What you see is my forge work. The item on the top is a wadding hook, and the item on the bottom is a wurm. I forged those out myself tonight to be the answer to junk left down in the bottom of scabbards.
Its fairly crowded down there in the bottom of a scabbard! And there is not a lot of room to get a tool down there. The hook is pretty useful, however, you have to get under the obstruction to allow it to work. The wurm was forged, twisted, and sharpened with the intention of drilling a hole in the obstruction to allow the hook to get in there to do its job. Traditionally, of course, a wurm was a tool designed to bit into a lead musket ball to allow it to be extracted in the event of a misfire. This one would not work for that purpose, I would have to make the little points on the ends a lot longer to make it into a true bullet extracting "wurm".
These tools are really small, I included a penny to show how small they are.

The top picture shows the junk I extracted from the bottom of Pierre's brand new Tinker hand and a half sword. What "WERE" they thinking!!!!

(technical specs....1040 steel, snow hardened. Hardly rocket science!)

Swords

click on the images to enlargeBill examining a couple of swords which seem to have been damaged.

closeup of the bell. I think it could use another brightening to perk up the gold. That gold layer is pretty thin!

These ones made it all the way to Vimy Ridge last spring for the ceremony. I was thrilled to be watching this very same sword saluting the Queen.

This is the Eagle headed air force sword. The air force plaque is raised on a backing, and is the exact same "albatross" which appears on the cap badges of airmen in England, Canada, and all the other commonwealth countries. This eagle (we only call it an albatross) transcends nationalism, and like the fouled anchor is the symbol of sailors, the albatross is the symbol of airmen all over.

After Plating

And there we go. Not the best looking scabbards in the world, but then, you can't put metal back after it is gone! Hopefully this will be good enough from ten feet away. Most of the damage you still see is on the part of the sword you really can't see because it is between the sword and the wearer's pant leg.

This is the best work I have ever done. Doesn't look like much does it?

Finished swords.

Having a heck of a time with this repair job. A couple of posts down, you saw how bad the scabbard was bent....it was smashed flat, perhaps by a horse stepping on it.
Now after 20 hours of labour, this is the result. Not perfect, but ready for plating.
I don't normally nickel plate big pieces like this....my tanks are too small, and so it is simply better to just have them plated by the professional plating companies. Unfortuantely, this week, the snow load destroyed the building the professional was in, and I had to step lively to retrieve this job from the wreckage. No further damage, but today, I have to repolish the pieces and send them to yet another plater.
Frustration does not begin to describe the feelings at this time.

Swords

These pictures are of one sword which has taken me a whole week to fix. The bell needed to be totally stripped of nickel plate, dents and scratches sanded away, the incised designs needed to be deepened, and the whole bell was polished, ready for plating. That was a long, but fairly straightforward job. The scabbard is of course, a little more interesting, in that it was badly damaged. We suspect a horse stepped on it. The scabbard is steel, with brass tips, drags, and ring holders.


The above two pictures are of the left side of the sword, and you can see the deep crease, (deep enough to interfear with the sword inside!) and a totally unwarranted scratch in the plating. The nickel has done its job of protecting the steel though....no rust, and because it is harder than the steel, it seems to have shrugged off a lot of abuse. At this stage, I have laid it out on the bench, and am selecting which of the several irons I will have to use to get those deep dents out.

This is the right side of the scabbard. There are two major dents in it, and a lot of wrinkled metal. Sometimes things look less damaged in real life than they look in the photographs, but no...these dents look just as bad when you have them in front of you. The metal in the higher crease, that is, the one closer to the bottom of the picture, is almost bent double.

Here I have placed my tools all together just to give some scale to the job. Tomorrow, I'll post a few pictures of what they look like after the first 20 hours of work to bring these swords back to life.

Finished! Read this series from the bottom up SVP

click on the images to enlarge.

Finally finished this long and robust job! You can see how highly reflective the nickel plating is...how nicely the sword knot is reflected in the front flat part of the bell.

Second picture from the top shows other items which go along with the sword repair...the backstrap, the bezel, back nut all needed to be polished and plated as well. I cut new leather bumpers from a piece of kid leather, and slide them on. The leather bumper keeps the sword from going "click" when it is slid into its scabbard. A "click" would mean a dent, and possibly a chip in the nickel.

Pictures number three and four show the sword all assembled together, and pic four is just to give you a glimpse of how ornate the etching is on the blade.

And the bottom picture is backstrap and handle...the operator's eye view so to speak.

So, just to repair the bell of the sword takes up to 40 hours to disassemble the sword, strip the old plating, deepen the decoration, sand out the dents and scratches, polish it up to a mirror finish with tripoli and rouge, clean, and electroclean the piece, nickel plate, and then re-assemble the sword. More if I have to cut new scabbard screws, or do any scabbard or blade work at all.

And the guys will use them and they will look just as bad in about 5 years.